JDS support

It’s no secret that a complex IT project can take years to complete. Digitally transforming a large organisation usually necessitates bringing on an entire team, and finding the right people to fill those roles is critical to the project’s success. JDS not only provides technical expertise and advice before and during an implementation project, but also offers ongoing support after the fact. Remote and on-site support ensure that your project continues to be successful. We also provide training for your team so that ultimately, your internal staff are confident and ready to take over when the time comes.

Two examples of extended on-site JDS support for clients in Australia are featured below.

A Large Insurance Company (LIC)

ITOM Monitoring, CMDB & Automation

JDS has provided the LIC with HPE BSM consulting services for more than eight years and support for the LIC’s full range of HPE Software (now Micro Focus) for the last three years. To give the LIC visibility into the performance of their business-critical systems and applications, we provide all the technical expertise to configure the HP BSM environment. JDS continues to support the LIC’s environment, providing assistance in upgrades and enhancements to their system and the day-to-day running of their software.

JDS has become a key partner in the LIC’s monitoring, event management, and automation teams and we regularly supplement their skills as required to build, configure, and enhance their monitoring technologies. In recent times, we have implemented OMi and migrated the LIC’s OMW instance to OMi.

As part of this project, JDS setup the integrations with third-party systems such as MS SCOM, Nagios, Solarwinds, Dell Foglight, IBM Tivoli, as well as HPE UCMDB, and HPE BSM. JDS also built the two-way integration (using HPE’s recommended method of groovy script and web services) with the LIC’s service desk tool (USD, Axios Assist, and most recently ServiceNow) and setup rules for incident ticket creations.

Without the assistance of JDS, we would not have been able to grow and mature our internal service offering and would be nowhere near as advanced as we are today.

IT ManagerLarge superannuation company

A Large Superannuation Company (LSC)

ITOM Monitoring, CMDB & ITSM

In 2015, JDS Australia was selected by the LSC to implement their replacement Enterprise ITSM and Monitoring platform. The LSC has relied on the best practice and technical expertise provided by JDS to architect, implement, administer, and maintain:

An enterprise event management and monitoring strategy across all of the technology for the LSC

Automation solutions (using HPOO and other toolsets and customisations) to automate manual processes that are error prone when done manually and/or resource/time-saving for the LSC

JDS has a current three-year contract to perform the day-to-day maintenance, support, and expansion of the LSC’s ITSM and Enterprise Event Management/Monitoring platform.

JDS Australia has provided invaluable support for us over the last few years. They have operated both remotely and on-site as part of our team. Their personnel have been able to operate across strategy and planning, installation and configuration, standing up of services, documentation, training and upskilling of company staff, and regular and out-of-hours support.

IT ManagerLarge superannuation company

Get supported

If you are looking for support for a current technical project, or simply want access to ongoing support for your environment, contact JDS today. Our expert team of local support consultants can provide you with personal service, fast issue resolution, and expedited ticket raising with our vendor partners.

Interruptions in service and performance issues put a significant amount of stress on IT teams. Whether it’s your internal users who face these roadblocks, or your end users/customers, problems with your services can lead to brand damage and loss of customers. Not only that, but resolving problems with your service can often take a huge amount of time and resources away from other projects.

That’s where JDS support comes in. Our team of local, Australia-based support consultants provide IT management, monitoring, and support services to customers all around the country, ensuring their environments function properly and their systems perform as needed. This allows your team to focus on business services and innovative projects by removing the burden of administrative IT tasks.

We have provided both temporary and ongoing support solutions for companies in a broad variety of industries, over a range of timeframes. In Part 1 of our Support Stories, we discussed the services we provided on an automation project and a service manager project. In Part 2, we have two more case studies featuring a large mining company and a respected Australian university.

Mining Company Case Study

A large mining company (LMC) handed over their Health Check System to Support to ensure the LMC’s applications were up and running. A request came in as a priority 2 where BSM was needed to analyse performance issues on their Sharepoint application, for which the script wasn't maintained and was failing consistently. This presented challenges as our consultants had to upskill quickly in Vugen (required to rework the script), and get a good grasp of the LMC’s environment, which was being slow and unstable (application crashing).

To start with, we had to re-work a script that was known to be problematic. Once that was fixed, the LMC would be able to use BSM to troubleshoot performance issues tied to the application.​

We treated this issue as a high priority and focused on finding a solution from the day the work was raised and approved from the LMC’s end. As part of this process, our team tapped into multiple knowledge sources to ensure that had all the information required to deliver a successful outcome for the LMC. To ensure proper expectations were set and met, we were in constant communication and providing updates to our stakeholders.

Ultimately, we raised the issue with our support team lead, who assisted in setting up a meeting internally to discuss the best way to go forward (whether it was best to get a consultant to go on-site or continue working on the issue, what needed to be done, who to contact or get involved, etc.) We ma​d​e use of all the resources available, such as logging high priority tickets with the vendor and checking the broad range of JDS staff resources to see who was able to assist.

As the project took longer than expected due to circumstances beyond the client’s control, we agreed on a reduced fee for the number of hours worked. ​In the end, we were able to fix the script after two weeks, and the client was pleased with the result and continues to engage JDS Support for its ongoing monitoring and performance checking needs.

University Case Study

A respected Australian university (RAU) had ingested some data sources into Splunk and the performance was degrading, which meant that data was not coming into the system. Because of this problem, they were not able to use Splunk to its full capacity.

Initially, the JDS support team disabled the inputs in Splunk to stop the degradation of the performance. However, that in of itself, did not solve the original issue and there was still the task of integrating new data sources into Splunk remaining.

Our remote support engineer engaged Splunk Support on behalf of the RAU. A JDS consultant and the support engineer also went on-site to the RAU to work directly with the client and collected logs and performance metrics for the support case—this was a special case, where the needs of the customer warranted an on-site visit that wouldn’t normally be included in their support plan.

Splunk Support suggested some solutions and we tested it in our own environment before going back to the RAU to implement the solution.

In the end, we were able to ingest all the data sources that the RAU needed and also improve performance on the servers.

Get supported

Are you looking for temporary or ongoing support for your environment? JDS provides a range of support packages and plans to suit the needs of a variety of businesses. Find out more by viewing our support page or email us at contactus@jds.net.au with your enquiry. If you are a current JDS customer, you can get in touch directly with your account manager to find out what support solutions would benefit you.

If you already have a stellar in-house technical team, why should you look for expert IT support? There are many advantages to seeking external advice and assistance when it comes to your IT infrastructure and management. Here are five ways your business may benefit from expert IT support:

1. Bring a niche capability to your existing IT team

Perhaps you need a specialist capability for only a few months, or a couple days a week. Whether it’s for a short-term period or a part-time basis, bringing a niche capability or skillset into your team can have immediate and lasting benefits for your organisation. Engaging expert IT support allows you to add new skills and knowledge to your team, without needing to go through an extensive recruitment process.

2. Ease the burden of IT maintenance so you can focus on business services

Meeting the best practice standards for IT management and system monitoring is a time-consuming, exhaustive process. On a given day, the IT team within your business may be tasked with:

Product Support

Licensing

Onboarding/Offboarding

Product upgrades

EOL Support

Small Enhancements

Product administration

With the assistance of external support, these tasks can be taken care of, allowing your internal team to have more time to be innovative and develop new solutions for your business.

3. Get a neutral perspective on your IT

Corporate IT teams are constantly under the pump, meeting the day-to-day needs of their business while also working on new projects to enhance their services. At times, it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees, and getting a neutral, external perspective from an expert can make all the difference. A fresh pair of eyes on your IT infrastructure and processes can bring new ideas to the table that will improve efficiency, cut down on unnecessary processes, and nurture creativity within your team.

4. Increase the visibility of your IT services

One of the most critical benefits expert IT support can provide is a significant increase in visibility of all your systems and applications. By increasing the executive’s visibility into all your IT services, you can immediately identify when and where things are going wrong, and fix them quickly before they impact your users. You also have access to highly available and capable support consultants to assist with any issues, should they arise.

5. Enhance your service capability

Ultimately, whether you hire long-term external support or temporary managed services, the benefits of bringing a fresh perspective, new skills, and better visibility into your team have a lasting impact. By using the resources and unique expertise of external support, you can enhance your business’s service capability and provide a better experience for your consumers.

JDS provides expert IT support that achieves all of these goals. Based in Melbourne, with a fully local Australian staff, our support team provides ongoing support for several major businesses throughout the country, including long-term on-site support. Our consultants resolve most support calls without needing to escalate to a vendor, but they are also able to raise tickets with any of our premier partners on your behalf and ensure our customers are given top priority.

We provide several tiers of support and can customise based on the needs of your business. Get in touch with us today using the contact form below, or call us on 1300 780 432 to discuss how our expert IT support team can benefit you.

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In addition to exceptional professional services and IT implementation, JDS provides both temporary and ongoing support for our clients. Our team of local, specialist support consultants ensures that clients receive fast issue resolution or assistance raising a ticket with vendors if issues cannot be immediately resolved in-house. However, we are proud to resolve more than half of the calls regarding system or software issues without needing to escalate to the vendor, and many incidents are resolved in the first phone call.

Over the years, our support team has provided assistance to hundreds of clients. In Part 1 of this two-part case study, members of the support team recall issues they have helped to resolve or new processes they have introduced to make life easier for in-house support teams.

Automation Case Study

JDS was engaged by a client, a government business enterprise who is known as the leader of reusable energy in Australia, to provide on-demand support for the automation of its IT operations. One of the requirements fulfilled was to automate the process for a particular type of service request, which processes emails sent to ServiceNow and automates the assignment of service providers and assignment groups.

This allows the team responsible for the delivery of the service to free up their capacity from manual administrative tasks such as going through emails and manually assigning jobs to relevant parties.The solution JDS support delivered uses an Inbound Email Action to handle the key words identified in the subject of the incoming emails and automates the process of placing a Service Catalog order, which then triggers the workflow to automate the assignment of relevant service groups according to pre-defined criteria. Using the latest best practice development methodologies, JDS was able to deliver this in only seven billable support hours. Along with efficiency, the implementation was delivered with:

ServiceNow platform best practice

Use of Agile methodology

Emphasis on clean code

Service Manager Case Study

As part of an ongoing support arrangement with a Queensland Government Organisation (QGO), JDS supported the on-premises HP Service Manager 9.4x instance. Over an extended period of time, several issues arose which were marked as resolved in the newer version, so it was deemed advisable to upgrade to the 9.50 version of the product. However, the QGO had previously had bad experiences with SM upgrades due to unforeseen compatibility issues and other problems, which had forced some upgrades to be rolled back or left in an incomplete state.

Since the issues were not going to be resolved in the existing version, the JDS support team collated a list of the existing tickets which were to be fixed in 9.50 and undertook a project to complete the upgrade on our own test environment and find any problems before beginning work on the client environment.

We took a copy of our existing Service Manager test instance and began making modifications to reproduce the QGO’s environment as closely as possible. The first phase involved testing to make sure that each issue was reproduced in our test environment and produced the expected results. After this, we began the upgrade process and documented any difficulties we encountered, then applied the appropriate patches and went through our testing process again.

By running through this upgrade in our test environment, we were able to ensure a smooth upgrade for our customer and be ready with solutions already planned out for any hiccups along the way. We were also able to independently verify that each reported issue was resolved with the new version so that we could manage customer expectations and have full confidence in our recommendations.

Get supported

Are you looking for temporary or ongoing support for your environment? JDS provides a range of support packages and plans to suit the needs of a variety of businesses. Find out more by viewing our support page or email us at contactus@jds.net.au with your enquiry. If you are a current JDS customer, you can get in touch directly with your account manager to find out what support solutions would benefit you.

Workplace Solutions

Our experts at JDS have provided a quick summary to ensure you are aware of the key enhancements in the new update.

Guided setups

These walk through the various aspects of setting up ServiceNow for use with ITSM, ITFM, and ITOM so it is well worth familiarising yourself with them.

Please note, this does not take the place of the ServiceNow Implementation Methodology (SIM).

Guided tours

You can create your own guided tour of various modules to allow for context sensitive help to support end users. You can also modify the OOB guided tours.

Be aware, it's a little challenging to set up as the designer doesn't delete steps properly, so be prepared to do some configuration in the regular form layout of the guide as well. Once configured, users can access these tours by clicking on the help icon, which shows the help side pane. At the bottom, there’s a “tour” button.

Knowledge portal

Knowledge within ServiceNow has been upgraded to be more user friendly. Unlike the customer facing service portal, this portal allows access to multiple knowledge bases, making it ideal to assist internal IT staff at first, second, and third levels of support.

Security hardening dashboard

This interactive dashboard shows the degree to which an instance of ServiceNow has been secured. It allows system admins to configure key security parameters across the platform.

SLA timelines

You can view the progress of SLAs on a timeline (go through the regular Service Desk SLAs to find this feature). This is a brilliant way for managers to monitor the progress of high-priority incidents without the need to micromanage staff, only getting involved when needed.

Accelerate your digital transformation with Micro Focus. In September 2017, the spin-merger of Micro Focus and HPE Software was finalised. JDS Australia continues to partner with Micro Focus to provide excellent, innovative IT solutions for clients in Australia and internationally.

Maximise the value IT delivers to your business

Micro Focus is a global leader in Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) software. Automated software quality management, performance testing, application management, and IT governance solutions by Micro Focus are used by most of the Fortune 100 companies to maximise the value that IT delivers to their business.

Realise efficiency. Drive agility. Accelerate innovation.

Companies today are experiencing competitive market pressures and rapidly changing customer demands. Our portfolio can drive hybrid infrastructure, enable complex application development demand, support technology in both traditional and modern models, and provide mobility within new services. It is designed for delivery in complex environments.

Decrease risk

Pinpoint bottlenecks

User experience

Deliver high-quality user experiences that scale, perform, and are secure

JDS capabilities with Micro Focus

Performance testing, consulting, and advice

JDS can provide strategic advice establishing and managing large and sophisticated performance testing centres of excellence, through to assisting with technology selection, or completing performance test engagements.

Application performance management

JDS can bring all your monitoring data into the application and service context, giving your operators the information, views, and dashboards ensuring visibility into application performance and service outages.

End-user experience monitoring

JDS can provide top-down monitoring of actual customer sessions with key metrics such as performance, latency, volume, or session data. Synthetic referencing transactions can also be executed to monitor consistency, availability, and trends.

Operations management

Dynamically discover infrastructure and applications while correlating event data related to these service-impacting issues, as well as topology data that ties the IT infrastructure to business services and metrics that describe business service availability and performance.

External performance testing services

JDS provides a complete package in which we will take care of the entire performance testing effort using our software and external load generators. If you don't have the time, resources, or skills to set up and run your own performance tests, let JDS take care of the details and deliver you the results.

Why choose JDS?

JDS is proud to be a Platinum Partner, authorised Training Partner, and Global Technology Enablement Partner with Micro Focus. With nearly 15 years of experience optimising performance and availability, and having won partnership awards for nine consecutive years, JDS is the partner of choice for trusted solutions across the range of Micro Focus applications and operations solutions.

JDS is a leading IT solutions provider and systems integrator, with expertise across industry-leading tools such as ServiceNow, Splunk, AppDynamics, Micro Focus, SAP, PagerDuty, CA Technologies, and more. We provide local, skilled, and responsive services to support IT projects and operations. Bringing together expert services, the latest technology, and best practices, JDS achieves improved IT outcomes for businesses. We do this by giving independent advice, providing training and ongoing support, and implementing IT testing, monitoring, and management solutions.

JDS runs a national Splunk practice with certified architects and engineers across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Adelaide. Our team of 20+ Splunk-certified consultants have experience spanning the core platform, IT Service Intelligence, Enterprise Security, and integrations with monitoring tools, dashboard engines, and various service desks.

Turn machine data into business value

Splunk can be used across data volumes ranging from gigabytes to hundreds of terabytes per day—all in real time. The Splunk platform is designed to make it easy to explore, analyse and visualise your data. This is described as Operational Intelligence. That is, once your data is loaded in Splunk, you can ask any question.

See the forest and the trees

Collect, analyse, and act upon the untapped value from the volume of data generated by your technology, helping drive operational and business results. JDS and Splunk can make your organisation become more productive, profitable, competitive, and secure by gaining valuable insights from your business data.

Why Splunk?

Collect & index data

Collect, index, and analyse any machine data at massive scale, without limitation

Search & investigate

Search all your data in one place in real time, revealing trends, spikes and patterns

Correlate & analyse

Use the power of machine learning to automatically identify anomalies and incidents

Report & visualise

Turn results into visualisations, build charts and save them as reports

Understand trends

Understand business trends, patterns of activity, and behavior to make more informed decisions

Customised data extraction

In certain cases, Splunk may need customisations to make certain machine data relevant and searchable. JDS can help extract key value pairs from machine data, which will give you insights into otherwise unusable data.

Onboarding new apps

JDS has experience across various companies and technologies onboarding new applications into Splunk analytics ecosystems, providing insights into application and operational performance.

Guided troubleshooting

Generate meaningful dashboards and search queries based on key words entered to move faster through each step of troubleshooting and arrive at the root cause.

Best practices

JDS can provide independent reviews and advice on Splunk deployments and usage, ensuring organisations get the most out of their investment. JDS also advises organisations on a maturity path to help adopt new Splunk use cases.

Further use cases

JDS can help identify further use cases that can be applied across the organisation, providing additional business value. Using the same data and software investment, organisations can gain different insights that JDS can help expose.

Why choose JDS?

JDS is a leading IT solutions provider and systems integrator, with expertise across industry-leading tools such as ServiceNow, Splunk, AppDynamics, Micro Focus, SAP, PagerDuty, and more. We provide local, skilled, and responsive services to support IT projects and operations. Bringing together expert services, the latest technology, and best practices, JDS achieves improved IT outcomes for businesses. We do this by giving independent advice, providing training and ongoing support, and implementing IT testing, monitoring, and management solutions.

We are one of the most-certified partners of Splunk in Australia, and we use our expertise to deliver projects in ITSI, Enterprise Security, AIOps, application monitoring, dashboard configuration, and more. Our consultants are skilled developers, capable of building custom applications within Splunk to help you maximise your investment, such as our Active Robot Monitoring solution. JDS is an SAP partner and the sole distribution and implementation partner in Australia for the SAP-Certified PowerConnect for Splunk solution.

Develop applications and experiences that excite, engage, and open up money-making opportunities across your organisation.

The application economy

Software fuels transformation for companies in the application economy. JDS supports CA's solutions designed to help speed up time to market, quality, and availability of business critical apps. With CA and JDS, organisations leverage technology that helps customers thrive by delivering the means to deploy, monitor, and secure their applications and infrastructure.

Bring great ideas to life through software

Hailed as one of the “World’s 100 Most Innovative Companies” by Forbes, CA Technologies creates IT software and solutions for some of the most powerful global companies. CA helps organisations develop, manage, and secure complex IT environments that increase productivity and enhance the competitiveness of their businesses.

Why CA Technologies?

End-user experience

Improved end-user experience and customer satisfaction levels

Reduced outages

Drastically decrease mean time to repair of service outages

Improved FTE efficiency

Substantial time and effort reduction in diagnostic processes

Pinpoint bottlenecks

Quickly isolate issues within a business context and identify bottlenecks

Early warnings

Predictive analytics for early warning into application performance

JDS capabilities with CA Technologies

End-to-end monitoring

JDS combines end-user experience and infrastructure monitoring data into service level management by tracing customer transactions across tiers. This data can be displayed in audience appropriate dashboards and reports.

End-user experience monitoring

JDS provides top-down monitoring of actual customer sessions with key metrics such as performance, latency, volume, or session data. Synthetic referencing transactions can also be executed to monitor consistency, availability, and trends.

Ongoing BAU monitoring

We can tune and configure APM solutions for ongoing 'business as usual' monitoring of your business critical applications.

Triage and diagnosis

Easily triage and diagnose problems by understanding the correlation of application performance to the rest of the environment.

Dashboard/single pane of glass

JDS implements a single pane of glass dashboard displaying performance and utilisation metrics to relevant stakeholders. Better decisions can be made when based on better information.

Mature SLA management

JDS can effectively manage SLA obligations, helping avoid penalties. Internal resources need to be able to work off timely and accurate information, prioritised according to what services relate to which customers, and the associated promised service level.

Why choose JDS?

JDS is a leading IT solutions provider and systems integrator, with expertise across industry-leading tools such as ServiceNow, Splunk, AppDynamics, Micro Focus, SAP, PagerDuty, CA Technologies, and more. We provide local, skilled, and responsive services to support IT projects and operations. Bringing together expert services, the latest technology, and best practices, JDS achieves improved IT outcomes for businesses. We do this by giving independent advice, providing training and ongoing support, and implementing IT testing, monitoring, and management solutions.